


i found love where it wasn't supposed to be

by spaceface16



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Ancient Rome, Crowley Being an Idiot (Good Omens), Drinking, Flashback, M/M, Masturbation, POV Crowley (Good Omens), Pining, handjobs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2020-12-14 00:24:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21006644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaceface16/pseuds/spaceface16
Summary: This retrospective collection and categorization of his feelings for Aziraphale is ultimately, as Crowley often likes to tell himself, an attempt to get rid of them. To explain them away, to convince himself that maybe they were never there at all. He analyzes his actions, his behaviors, his thoughts, puts them underneath the microscope of memory and inspects them. Takes them apart, strand by strand, as he repeats the mantrait isn’t lovein low thrumming tones inside his mind.He chooses to ignore the fact that this exercise in rumination often produces the exact opposite reaction.





	1. i found love where it wasn't supposed to be

**Author's Note:**

> the title of this fic and its first chapter is taken from the song "i found" by amber run.

_It isn’t love_, Crowley thinks to himself. 

His body is reclining itself across his leather sofa, raising a glass of whiskey to his lips. 

His mind is taking a magnifying glass and aiming it across history, zooming in on years, places, moments. 

This is something Crowley does often. One might say he does it _obsessively_, but that is a phrase Crowley has tried very hard to eradicate from his vocabulary. 

This retrospective collection and categorization of his feelings for Aziraphale is ultimately, as Crowley often likes to tell himself, an attempt to get rid of them. To explain them away, to convince himself that maybe they were never there at all. He analyzes his actions, his behaviors, his thoughts, puts them underneath the microscope of memory and inspects them. Takes them apart, strand by strand, as he repeats the mantra _it isn’t love_ in low thrumming tones inside his mind. 

He chooses to ignore the fact that this exercise in rumination often produces the exact opposite reaction. 

Today, Crowley’s perusing lens hones in on Rome. 

_Now that definitely wasn’t love_. He lets out the suggestion of a laugh under his breath, permits himself to feel a momentary wave of confidence. _It was certainly something, but it wasn’t love_. 

He watches the scene play out from the comfort of his memory. He watches himself watch Aziraphale from across the tavern. 

Crowley knows he is there long before the angel notices him in return. He had been sitting in a dark corner of the room, drinking and watching Aziraphale (which are, admittedly, two of his favorite activities), for a long time before deciding to venture over to the bar for another drink, deliberately putting himself in Aziraphale’s line of sight. 

_It isn’t love_ when he knows he can feel Aziraphale’s eyes on his back. 

_It isn’t love_ when he hears the scrape of Aziraphale’s chair across the floor and knows it isn’t because he’s leaving, isn’t because he’s trying to get out before he thinks Crowley will notice him (_isn’t love_ that Crowley had noticed him a considerable time before). 

_It isn’t love_ when he lets himself be led into conversation, _isn’t love_ when he tells Aziraphale he’s never eaten an oyster, knowing full well it will prompt an invitation to dinner. 

_It isn’t love_ when he leaves his half-empty drink at the bar in favor of following the angel through the city, _isn’t love_ when he sits across from him in an unfamiliar restaurant and lets Aziraphale order for him. 

_Love_ isn’t to blame when Crowley lingers at the table long after the meal is finished, sipping on wine and listening to Aziraphale chatter on about nothing in particular as the sun sinks lower and lower on the horizon, the shadows on the walls growing longer and deeper as time rolls on. 

(_What was it then?_ Crowley’s voice demands frantically inside his head. _The need for empathetic company, the craving of understanding, enjoying the presence of the only being on Earth that can truly give me these things_, he replies to himself.)

(He resolutely ignores the voice that whispers _if that isn’t love, I don’t know what is_.)

The Crowley that exists within the present Crowley’s film of memory had been lulled into a comfortable reverie of his own, hardly noticing when Aziraphale’s river of conversation had stilled into a question aimed towards the demon. 

“What was that, angel?” he said, pulling himself out of his thoughts with a shake of his head and a deep swallow of wine.

“I _asked_ for the specifics of what you were planning to do while you were in Rome,” Aziraphale replied. He looked only vaguely miffed that Crowley hadn’t been paying attention. 

“Oh, y’know,” Crowley shrugged, “I just thought I’d throw around a couple minor temptations and some general mischief. Nothing of any import, really. Nothing explicitly ordered from Downstairs, at least. The humans are making worse trouble for themselves up there in the Forum Romanum than anything I’m doing myself.” 

(This was true. Crowley had stopped trying to lie to Aziraphale _at least_ half a century prior. It didn’t often work, and it was honestly not worth the trouble when it did.)

“Ah, I see,” The angel looked relieved. “I suppose I needn’t bother with doing any more miracles while I’m here than I was originally planning, then. In fact,” Aziraphale continued, raising an eyebrow with more than a hint of mirth, “I might take the rest of the night off. I’ve travelled quite a bit recently, and I’ve fallen terribly behind in the reading material I’ve been collecting.”

Crowley scoffed, not as unkindly as one might typically picture a demon scoffing. 

“_That’s_ your idea of a riveting night to yourself? Please, angel, if I’ve given you the gift of a night off, you could at least allow me the peace of knowing you’re doing something interesting with it.”

Aziraphale took a long, decisive sip of his wine, clearly examining the merits of several different lines of thought behind his eyes. After a drawn-out moment, he replied. 

“Well, what would you suggest?”

They ended up on the banks of the Tiber River. 

This was not Crowley’s original suggestion, but after sitting through the first ten minutes of several different comedic theatre performances, the demon self-consciously decided that none of them were up to snuff with Aziraphale’s sophisticated idea of entertainment, and had insisted they leave early. Out of ideas, Crowley had taken them to a bathhouse, where he had (quite drunkenly, by this point in the evening) claimed he could most definitely beat the angel in a swimming competition, thus proving that he was, in fact, the superior supernatural being. Aziraphale had replied that this was a ridiculous idea for several reasons, including that the pools in the bathhouse were much too small, and that they would be bothering the other patrons (the thought that swimming was not, perhaps, the definitive way to determine the overall ranking between two beings that could perform divine and wretched miracles either seemed too obvious to point out or didn’t occur to Aziraphale at all). 

So, they found themselves beside the river. A populated spot when the sun was shining, all but deserted at this time of night. 

They had not, in fact, gotten into the water, and instead they sat sprawled out on the banks, trading sips back and forth off a bottle of red Crowley had nicked from one of their previous venues. Their stream of small talk had faded into comfortable silence some time ago, and the demon had taken to gazing at the stars when he wasn’t stealing covert glances in Aziraphale’s direction.

(_It isn’t love_ that he has always much preferred to look at the angel rather than the sky; Crowley was in no way responsible for Aziraphale’s tendency to shine much brighter than the leisurely spread of constellations above them.)

They had spent nearly half an hour at the river’s edge when it dawned on Crowley that neither of them had any intention of getting in the water that evening. 

“I bet it’s too cold, anyway,” the demon mumbled into the mouth of the wine bottle. 

“What’s cold?” Aziraphale responded, taking the bottle from Crowley’s pliant hands. 

“The water. Bet it’s too cold anyway. For swimming.”

“Oh yes. That makes sense, I suppose.” The angel paused to tip the remaining dregs of wine into his mouth. “And it’s getting late too, really. I should be getting back to my room at some point this evening.” 

“Yeah. Me as well.” 

(This is the part where Crowley of the present, Crowley the onlooker, begins to yell to himself _No! Don’t even think about going there! Watch out behind_ (or in this case, in front of) _you!_ in his mind like a person watching a horror movie they’ve already seen before.)

Crowley of memory, through his drunken haze, had allowed himself to really focus on Aziraphale’s face. This is not something he has allowed himself to do often. (It is, however, something he has in common with Crowley of the present day, who knows quite well how much trouble can come from letting himself look the angel full in the face. That’s not _love_, though, that’s just poor decision-making skills. _It can’t be helped_.)

He’d be blessed if it wasn’t a face sculpted by God Herself (which, in fact, it was). The reason he tried to stop himself from looking wasn’t because it only occurred to him that Aziraphale was attractive when he was staring straight at him. Oh, no, that thought occurred to Crowley regardless of whether or not he was in his line of vision. It occurred to him (perhaps most often, truth be told) when Aziraphale was thousands of miles away. The angel could be all the way up in Heaven and that thought would still buzz around in Crowley’s mind like flies around Beelzebub’s head. 

The _reason_ Crowley often forced himself to keep his eyes off of his divine adversary was because, on the rare (although not as rare as he would like to think) occasion that he gave in to himself, it became a bit... (_Overwhelming. It’s not love to think an angel’s beautiful. God made ‘em that way, obviously. Can’t. Be. Helped._ )

After more than a minute of silent staring, Aziraphale started to sense that something might be a bit off with his companion. 

“Is everything alright, dear boy?” 

“Oh yeah. Fine.” Crowley tried to shake himself out of his momentary fixation, picking up the empty wine bottle and miracling it full again. He took a deep swig of it before allowing himself to look once more in the angel’s direction. Not full on this time, only out of the corner of his eye.

Aziraphale’s brows furrowed. “Are you quite sure? You do look a bit peaky.” He reached out a hand as if to gauge Crowley’s temperature from his forehead. (_As if demons could get sick. As if, even if they could, Aziraphale would ever be able to feel a fever on this cold-blooded brow._)

“Don’t.” Crowley had flinched back in an instant, shaking his head vehemently. “Don’t touch me.” 

Aziraphale’s eyes widened. “I- I’m sorry, I just thought that-”

(_It isn’t love_ that Crowley feels guilty for putting that look on the angel’s face.)

“I’m not responsible,” Crowley interrupted, drunkenly, impulsively convinced that the words needed to be said. “I’m not responsible for what I’ll do if you touch me.” 

That stopped Aziraphale in his tracks. “What do you mean by that?”

“Exactly what it sounds like, angel.” 

“What does it sound like?” he asked, suddenly as sharp and as urgent as a knife. 

“I-” Crowley started and then stopped with a sigh, clearly struggling to find the words. He knew this was out of the blue, knew he wasn’t quite making sense, but he also knew that he was drunk and he’d been watching Aziraphale all night and he was afraid that he would break down like paper in water if the angel got too close to him. (_Tell him. Tell him what it is. But don’t tell him that it’s_ love. _Because it’s not._) “I’m not exactly the pinnacle of self-control. I can take so much but if you touch me, that’s the breaking point. I can’t take any more than that. I suggest you mind what you do.”

Aziraphale took a moment to consider that statement before asking his next question. 

“What on Earth are you talking about, Crowley?” 

No response. Aziraphale continued.

“I think we should sober up.”

Crowley scoffed at that. Shook his head. “I couldn’t possibly face this sober.”

“And what exactly, pray tell, are you facing?”

The demon shot him another anxious sidelong glance, his sunglasses slipping down just enough for his snake-yellow eyes to become visible in the moonlight. “I think that’s your call, angel.”

The pair held eye contact for a moment. The expression in Aziraphale’s eyes was unreadable to him, a foreign language that Crowley could not understand. (Crowley of the present is _tense_, on the edge of his seat as if what’s going to happen next will come as a complete surprise to him. Perhaps it still does, even now. His hands shake. Whiskey spills out of his glass and onto the floor. He doesn’t even notice.)

Suddenly, something broke. Crowley could feel it in the air. Aziraphale’s expression became firm. Resolute. (_He knows. He knows what I’m feeling and he knows it’s <strike>not</strike> love_). 

The angel’s hand came back up, finished the movement it had started earlier. It rested on Crowley’s forehead, just for a moment, before coming down to cup his cheek. Crowley sucked in a shaky breath, shut his eyes briefly, tried to maintain whatever semblance of dignity and control he had left. 

“I told you to be careful, Aziraphale. You don’t know what you’re getting into here.”

Clouds seemed to cover the angel’s eyes again, rendering them unknowable. Softly, he countered Crowley’s claim. 

“Who says that I don’t?”

Crowley’s cheek burned where Aziraphale’s hand was pressed against it, so much so that he was surprised Aziraphale hadn't noticed it. His hand slid down a bit, gently, just enough for the angle’s thumb to brush across Crowley’s bottom lip. 

(_I stand corrected._ That _was the breaking point._)

The demon pressed forward, taking less than a second to topple over every metaphysical wall he had so painstakingly put up over the last several centuries. He pushed his lips urgently against Aziraphale’s, his arms coming to bracket the angel’s body in the grass. Aziraphale didn't seem phased at all (which was not what Crowley had been expecting in the slightest), and his hands quickly found a place knotted into Crowley’s hair, pressing him closer and deepening the kiss. Crowley’s nerve endings lit up like fireworks as he felt Aziraphale’s tongue push into his mouth. He allowed his racing mind to be calmed for a moment by the push-pull rhythm of their mouths and the taste of wine and some untraceable sweetness on the angel’s tongue. 

After a few long moments, Crowley managed to wrench a smidgen of self-control back from the void he had tossed it into. With breath he didn’t quite have yet, he pressed a desperate question into Aziraphale’s open mouth. 

“Are you sure you want this, angel?”

“_Yes_.” He pulled back just enough to be able to look Crowley dead in the eyes. “Despite what you may think, I have been waiting for this.”

Crowley quickly came to the conclusion that statement was something he could not mentally process at the moment (a decision which Crowley of the present still _vehemently_ supports and chooses to file it away deep in the cabinet of his mind to this very day). Instead, he leaned back and pulled the angel with him, tugging insistently at his hips until Aziraphale was kneeling over him, his knees slotted between Crowley’s own. He kept his hands on the angel’s hips, clutching them tightly as Aziraphale leaned down to kiss him once more.

“Tell me what you want from me, then,” Crowley said softly, his voice laced with challenge in an attempt to cover up the truth of how much he wanted to please him. 

Aziraphale hesitated for a moment, worrying his bottom lip as he thought. Then, in a lower voice than Crowley had ever heard from him before:

“Take me in your hand.”

The demon scarcely managed to bite back a groan of pleasure.

“_Yeah_. Yeah, I can do that for you, angel.” Crowley slithered one of his hands down from its perch on Aziraphale’s hip to press insistently at his inner thigh, dipping underneath his robes. He kept it there for a spell, trying not to let him feel that it was shaking. As he pushed it higher, he raised his eyes to meet Aziraphale’s gaze. 

The angel was wide-eyed, his pupils blown, and his lips were pressed tightly together in a thin line. The words _don’t tease, Crowley_ escaped his mouth quickly, breathlessly like a bird shooting into the night. (Crowley of memory painted this view like a picture in his mind and has kept it in pristine condition throughout the passing centuries; Crowley of the present day is eternally grateful for this.)

Summoning the last dregs of his drunken willpower, Crowley slid his hand up the rest of the way. As he wrapped it around Aziraphale’s cock, he felt the angel lose some of his balance, causing him to lean more heavily into the hand still gripping his hip. Crowley let him down slowly, allowing Aziraphale time to prop himself up on his hands, which had come down framing his head in the grass. 

“Oh, God, _Crowley_.” 

The demon struggled to hold in a laugh at that remark.

“I’m one of those things, you’ve got that right.”

“_Hush_.” Aziraphale slipped down further, sinking his forearms into the ground and pressing his face into the side of Crowley’s neck. 

Crowley picked up the pace, twisting his wrist and gliding his thumb across Aziraphale’s tip. He felt the angel moan delicately into his skin, felt his hot breath against his neck, felt his own cock straining underneath his robes, untouched. 

(_It wasn’t love_ that he was _burning up_, hotter than any hellfire. Modern-day Crowley feels it too, even from multiple millennia away. His cock is restrained in infinitely more restrictive leather trousers, and he drops his now-empty whiskey tumbler to the floor in favor of rutting up against his open hand. Admittedly, Crowley had never really expected this mental exercise to go any other way. He’d have been surprised if he _wasn’t_ touching himself by this point, to be honest.)

Aziraphale seemed to regain some presence of mind (although Crowley might have referred to this as _mercy_) and pushed one of his thighs tightly between Crowley’s legs. The demon ground himself up against it eagerly, letting out a hiss of pleasure as he gained some relief from the pressure that had been building steadily inside of him. 

“_Fuck_, angel, about time, isn’t it?” he breathed, trying not to show Aziraphale exactly how good that was making him feel. 

“Don’t be insolent, Crowley,” Aziraphale replied with an amused huff, leaning deeper into Crowley’s ministrations with a twitch of his hips. “You’ve been enjoying this, I can see it in your eyes. Don’t hide it from me.” 

The demon did his best not to muffle the next soft whine that escaped his lips. 

“_Ah_, see, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“You tell me,” Crowley shot back with a grin and a particularly pointed jerk of hips against Aziraphale’s thigh. 

“_Honestly_-”

Crowley quieted the angel’s coming gripe by speeding his hand up just a bit more against his cock. It worked like a charm, and Aziraphale was reduced to panting into his neck before he could finish his sentence. 

_It isn’t love_ that this is the best Crowley’s felt in a very long time. _It isn’t love_ that he couldn’t think of anything else he’d rather be doing, anywhere else he’d rather be, even if his immortal soul depended on it. _It isn’t love_ that he was completely enamored by the way Aziraphale shuddered against him as he thrust into Crowley’s hand. 

He could tell Aziraphale was getting close when his panting started to crescendo into a low, drawn-out moan. The hand that wasn’t working in between them found itself tangled in Aziraphale’s hair, combing through it soothingly.

“That’s right, angel,” Crowley hissed softly into his ear, pausing to move down and press an open-mouthed kiss to his jaw before coming back up. “Show me what it looks like when you let go.”

Aziraphale tensed in his arms, gasping out Crowley’s name once more in a breathless whisper before releasing into the demon’s waiting hand. Crowley held him as he shook, held him as he spent himself with his head burrowed into the juncture of Crowley’s neck and shoulder. (_It isn’t love_ that Crowley silently willed this moment to last for a bit longer than it should have. _It isn’t love_ that he felt echoes of the same bliss Aziraphale was feeling even though he himself was nowhere close to coming. _It isn’t love_ that this is the point where present-day Crowley comes, sprawled out on his couch, his hand wrapped around his own aching cock and Aziraphale’s name on his whiskey-laced breath.)

Eventually, though, Crowley felt reality come back down, heavier than ever on his bone-thin shoulders. He miracled away the mess between them with a blink, and Aziraphale pushed himself off of Crowley shakily, coming to rest on the grass beside him once more. 

Crowley suddenly felt very, very cold and very, very sober. He had been right when he said there was no way he could face this situation if he wasn’t intoxicated. He needed to go, needed to find a space to think and breathe, somewhere private and secluded and away from angels that looked at him with something unnamed and tender in their eyes. 

He sensed Aziraphale moving closer, presumably attempting to return the demon’s favor, but Crowley waved him off with a shake of his head.

“That’s okay, angel, don’t worry about it.” Aziraphale opened his mouth to speak, but Crowley cut him off before he could begin. “You should be making your way back to your room, anyway, and I’ve got a laundry list of temptations to perform. The dead of night’s the easiest time for me to get work done, anyway. The humans are so much more open to dastardly ideas when they’re boozed up and sleep-deprived.”

“Are- are you sure, Crowley? Because I’d be happy to-” 

“No, no, really, it’s fine. I’ve got a busy night ahead of me.” The demon got to his feet, brushing off his robes and adjusting his sunglasses. 

Aziraphale was beginning to look quite confused, even a touch anxious. “My dear, perhaps we should talk about-”

“I’ll see you around, angel.” 

He turned his back and began walking towards the city. Aziraphale didn’t protest any further, and Crowley didn’t look back even once. 

(_It isn’t love_ that he had to clench tightly onto every muscle in his body in order to stop himself from looking.)

The Crowley lying comfortably on his sofa in modern-day Mayfair shakes himself out of his memory after he watches himself walk away from Aziraphale. He knows what happens next, knows that he walks back to his room at a seedy Roman inn and desperately jerks himself off to the thought of what he had done to the angel. Knows that he’s never brought it up since, not once, even after all these centuries. 

He knows that it was love, knew the whole time that it was love, but pretends he just got distracted, side-tracked, that next time he’ll get the point clear through his thick skull.

(_It isn’t love_ that Crowley only tells himself all that so he can have an excuse to do it all again tomorrow.)


	2. a scribbled out name (my love keeps writing again and again)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A glance at Crowley through eternity, both before and after Rome.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this fic was originally supposed to be a oneshot but my hand slipped and now i have an entire plot outline. whoopsy.
> 
> the title of this chapter is taken from the song "falling" by florence & the machine.

All stories must have a beginning. A cliff face to jump from. The walk through the desert on the way there doesn’t matter. If it did, it would have been in the story. The only parts that matter are the fall and, eventually, the landing. (Sometimes you land gracefully, swan diving into the ocean below with ease and precision. Other times, you hit the ground with more force than a bullet piercing a heart. You never know until you get there.)

The story Crowley has been thinking about lately did not begin in Rome, did not start with oysters and rivers and wine and hurried exits. Rome may have been the location of the first major plot point, but it certainly wasn’t the beginning.

No, of course not. Crowley had already fallen many times before then.

The first time Crowley fell was, logically, when he fell from Heaven. The difference between this fall and all the others is that it was not a fall in the metaphorical sense, the emotional sense, but was, in fact, a very real one. It had hurt. There was fire involved. He was burned and bruised when he awoke. For someone who had, up until that very day, lived in a place where pain did not exist, it was a very unpleasant wake-up call.

That was Crowley’s first beginning (the actual first beginning, the Beginning, the one where the being who would eventually be known as Crowley came into physical existence, doesn’t count because he does not remember it).

Crowley’s fall from grace was not, however, the beginning of _this_ story. For, as most beings (even ones of occult and ethereal natures) usually come to realize, life is comprised of several different stories layered on top of one another, all messily wrapped and tangled together with too much intricacy and complexity for one to ever truly puzzle apart in entirety.

If asked where he would stick the pin of _beginning_ regarding this one story in particular, Crowley would not answer, because he doesn’t answer questions like that.

He would, however, call to mind the image of a garden wall, and of one white wing spread out over his head like an awning. He would be quietly satisfied that scene was the beginning, know without a doubt that it was the start, the _fall_ (because what else could he possibly label that sinking feeling in his stomach, that roller coaster swoop of his insides when the angel looked into his snake eyes without the look of absolute disgust he had been expecting?).

Yes, that was the beginning. That was the beginning because before that moment, before that conversation, Crowley hadn’t really known what to expect from Earth. He didn’t know what he was doing, didn’t have much going on inside his head. Sure, he had been doing his job, had tempted Eve and been the mastermind of original sin, but he hadn’t really _thought_ about it. Until he met Aziraphale, Crowley had been on autopilot.

And afterwards, well. Afterwards, he was on high alert (he could sense the absolute _ruin_ a face like the angel’s could make of him; he knew he had to be careful). Afterwards, Crowley stepped lightly upon the solid ground of Earth, mindful of the tendency it had to start quaking beneath his feet. He was wary of disturbing it.

Crowley had experienced his first earthquake in the presence of Aziraphale. They had been in a vast desert, somewhere or another, both quietly attempting to influence the same small tribal community. The humans around them thought the quake was a message of warning from their gods. Crowley immediately assumed he had been thinking about Aziraphale a little too hard while watching him surreptitiously across a campfire, thought he had inadvertently directed the very ground to start shaking in some distracted, wayward miracle. (He had been thinking of the angel’s hands, of how they could easily push him to the ground without any trouble, hold him down, keep him in place on the ground, stop him from moving for once in his twisting, squirming, slithering existence. He had been thinking of peace. Then the ground started shaking.)

He was worried for a long time that Aziraphale would somehow manage to figure this out, to pick up how loud Crowley was thinking of him like a radio frequency, that he had thought about it so much he had caused the very ground to move beneath them. He was worried until a number of years later, thousands of miles away from that place, thousands of miles away from Aziraphale, vastly different thoughts on his mind, when the ground began to shake once more. He shed his paranoia about earthquakes after that, but it still managed to sneak into his mind in other ways, the superstition that his preoccupation with the angel was leaking out of him like rain through a shoddy roof.

So, he was careful. He was careful when he was by himself, and he was especially careful when he was around Aziraphale. He reigned himself in as much as he could, held himself back with concrete dams inside his brain and padlocks around his heart, stoppered himself up with wine corks that blocked certain words from escaping his foolish, red-stained mouth.

It made perfect sense that Crowley would occasionally overflow.

The overflow follows a pattern. It is a rhythm, a poem, a song that Crowley feels start to crescendo after he spends too much time in Aziraphale’s presence. He feels it shaking to life in his bones, feels the pressure growing until he has no choice but to let everything go.

He’s able to wait until he finds somewhere that he can be alone, but that’s where his patience ends. (What city he’s in, what year it is, doesn’t matter. It’s always the same, every single time. The details might change, but the story stays the same.)

Whenever Crowley gets like this, stumbles over to the breaking point of held-in desire (held-in <strike>love</strike>), he swears he can smell the angel wafting from underneath his skin.

He feels like he’s on fire. He is reminded, briefly, of tumbling from Heaven, of falling out of grace. For a minute, he can almost remember the searing, burning pain of hurtling through the atmosphere, of existing momentarily as a shooting star before crashing to the ground with devastating force.

This thought is shaken out of Crowley’s mind rather quickly, though, because it’s _wrong_. Because, despite everything else (despite what Crowley tells himself), _this_ fall is not violent in nature. This fall is not unkind. It may be painful, may be sad, but it is laced with something pure, something lovely, something made of nothing but _light_.

And Crowley _loves_ light. He does. He basks in it, bathes in it, serpentine. Drinks it in like liquor. Thinks about it now, as he’s laying in an otherwise empty bed (whose location in both time and space is unimportant, the point is, it is _empty_). Thinks about it as he reaches down and unzips his trousers, taking his cock into his hand and letting himself go for the first time in what feels like eons (but, in reality, it’s only been a week or two since the last time he did this).

Crowley tells himself he’s thinking about light, but this is only half-true.

He’s thinking about light, sure, but he’s also thinking about something else. About the way light falls delicately across a face (not any specific face, mind you), and the way it flashes across blue eyes and makes them shimmer like the surface of the ocean on bright summer days. He’s thinking about gold-white hair (hair the color of sunlight), how it would feel if, maybe, Crowley’s fingers were buried in it as Aziraphale opens up and takes him in and three desperate words slip out of Crowley’s mouth-

He stops. That’s going too far (or too close). He thinks about light again.

Rather, he thinks about the absence of light. Yes, that makes things easier. No light, no way to see, no way to tell who it is that’s touching him. In the dark, there is nothing stopping lies from being true. In the dark, Crowley can pretend that secrets held for millennia are being spoken into the open air, and, later, he can pretend that he wasn’t even thinking about it.

After all, it’s too dark to know for sure who he was imagining, whose tongue he was picturing wrapping around the tip of his cock, dragging slowly across his slit before sinking back down again. Whose cheeks he was thinking must have been hollowed out as Crowley was sucked deep into his mouth. Whose throat he was contemplating when he finally spilled, hot and desperate, into the palm of his own hand. And if he says something (if he says _I love you_, if the angel-shaped shadow figure in Crowley’s fantasies wraps himself around him and says it in return), he can pass it off as something said in the heat of the moment, with no consideration for the nameless body that he was imagining.

Crowley comes with love on his mouth, adoration on his lips (a name on his tongue that quite nearly causes him to choke with the effort of trying not to say), and he is quick to rinse it away with a swig of something stronger than the water which had been in his cup until a moment before.

He cleans himself up in the blink of an eye, but not fast enough to avoid the wave of shame that washes across his skin. He shakes it off fairly efficiently, though, because that’s what he always does. Crowley gets back to work because it’s good for him to be distracted. It’s good for his mind to be occupied with temptations other than his own.

It works well enough for a while, but then he runs into the angel at some theatre, some park, some café (anywhere, because this is eternal, this is infinite, because Crowley has done this so many times it doesn’t even matter anymore), and the cycle starts all over again.

Crowley had been dancing this same routine (just a little bit altered) long before what happened in Rome. At that point, he had been very familiar with it, familiar with the overflowing feeling, and he was able to take care of it most of the time without too much difficulty. His encounter with Aziraphale in Rome was a result of poor planning and even poorer judgement on Crowley’s part. He knew he wasn’t mentally prepared to spend that much time in the angel’s presence, knew he would eventually lose control if he let it go too long. He had been selfish, though, and he didn’t want to give up Aziraphale’s company in favor of going back to the inn to be alone.

Fortunately enough, however, Aziraphale had been more than willing to oblige Crowley’s poorly tamed hunger for him, more than willing to allow the demon’s hands all over him, his tongue inside his mouth (allowed him to do so with an eagerness that Crowley struggles to explain away when looking back on this incident). And while that was wonderful, and while Crowley was incredibly grateful, he knew it couldn’t go farther than that. He knew that if he let Aziraphale touch him in the same way, let the angel bring him to the same release that Crowley had brought him to, he would never be able to satisfy himself on his own again. So, he’d left.

He’d left (vehemently ignoring what sounded like protests from Aziraphale), went back to his room, and got himself off on his own. He thought that he had gotten away in time, slinked away quickly enough that nothing would be changed, nothing altered.  
And he had, in a way. Aziraphale never mentioned it, and everything seemed to be exactly how it was before. Crowley tempted and drank and hung around the angel when he was close, which was often followed by periods of isolation and self-pleasure behind double-locked doors.

He never had to wash love from his mouth before, though. Before he knew what Aziraphale tasted like, how warm his bare skin was, what his throbbing cock felt like beneath his hand. That was new, that was different.

Crowley figured out how to cope with it, eventually, by the skin of his teeth. It took an incredibly long time, and he forced himself to spend as much time away from Aziraphale as he could while he was doing it. He managed it, though, in the end. Learned ways to hold down that new feeling (which wasn’t exactly new, not really, but much more intense than it had ever been before). Taught himself how to pretend it wasn’t any different (how to pretend it _wasn’t love_). The cycle started over again, nearly the same as before, and his life rolled on, began anew.

That is the nature of stories and the nature of falling. There is always more than one story, always more than one height to fall from. Crowley knows this well, knows falling well. He sometimes wonders whether one day he’ll finally reach a definitive bottom (wonders what happens when you get up after you hit the ground, wonders what happens when you finally admit you’ve fallen in love), but that is a story for another day.

For the moment, in the lonesome comfort of his empty, echo-filled Mayfair flat, Crowley chooses to avoid searching for that final cliff face, to avoid seeking out the fall that could lead to the brutal end of his entire existence (but could also be the start of an entirely new one), in favor of tripping down the more familiar drop-offs, the ones he’s seen a thousand times before (Rome isn’t the only one; there are many, _many_ more). At least, that way, he can take comfort in the fact that he already knows how those stories end.

He already knows what the ground feels like.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks so much for reading and for your kudos and comments on the previous chapter! i really appreciate it <3
> 
> i have a plot outline for this fic but i genuinely have no idea how many chapters it could end up being lol
> 
> if you're interested you can find me on tumblr @ spaceface16


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